NZ charities are running out of runway

New Zealand's Not for Profit sector has been surveyed on the same question every year since 2003: what's your biggest concern? The answer has never changed. It's funding. Twenty-three years running, and it's still funding.

A quarter of NZ charities have less than a year left, if nothing changes.

Grant Thornton's 2026 sector report surveyed 205 New Zealand charities and incorporated societies, and the numbers are worth sitting with. 40% have less than one year of reserves and secured funding combined to keep operating. Only 31% have one to two years covered. The top three concerns organisations named, unprompted, were all versions of the same problem: financing day-to-day activities (36%), managing long-term sustainability (20%), and diversifying income (15%).

That's not a sector short on ambition or competence. It's a sector running on a funding model that was never built for stability in the first place.

Why grants and donations were never going to fix this on their own.

Most charity income comes in one of two shapes: a grant, tied to a specific project and a specific timeframe, or a donation, which rises and falls with the news cycle, the season, and how many other causes are asking at the same time. Both are genuinely valuable. Neither is something an organisation can actually plan three years of frontline delivery around, because neither is guaranteed to look the same next year.

The report puts a number on what that uncertainty actually costs organisations: it's hard to invest in staff, hard to commit to multi-year programmes, hard to build anything that outlasts the current funding cycle, when you don't know if next year's income will resemble this year's at all.

Recurring income is a different shape of problem entirely.

This is really the whole argument for why predictable, repeatable funding matters more than the size of any single grant. A well-run charity lottery, run properly and repeatedly, doesn't remove funding uncertainty altogether, nothing does, but it's a fundamentally different shape of income to a one-off grant: recurring, plannable, and not dependent on asking the same donors for the same thing every few months. That's the entire premise behind Swell's own model, and it's also just a reasonable thing for any charity to want, regardless of who's offering it.

None of this means grants and donations stop mattering. They don't. But a sector where 40% of organisations are under a year from running dry is a sector that needs more than one type of income working at once, and recurring funding is the type that's been missing.